An epidemic of lunacy

Humans are odd creatures sometimes.

We have a regrettable tendency to abandon reason entirely when we're confronted with scary circumstances.  I suppose it's understandable enough; we're emotional as well as logical, and when we're frightened the emotional parts of our brain tend to swamp the more rational bits.

Still, it'd be nice if we could control that tendency, because it would help to reduce our likelihood of falling for weird counterfactual explanations at the times that it's the most critical for us to keep our  heads screwed on straight.

Take, for example, the most recent Scary Circumstance, namely, the outbreak of Wuhan coronavirus that so far has killed just over a hundred people, sickened thousands, and (by some estimates) left over a hundred thousand people at risk of exposure.

Coronaviruses [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the CDC]

Worrisome stuff, isn't it?  The potential for a pandemic is there, and the unknowns about the virus still outnumber the knows -- the rate at which it's passed on (what the epidemiologists refer to as "R0"), whether it's mutating as it spreads, what the mortality rate is, whether it's contagious while an individual is still asymptomatic.  But as I alluded to earlier, "frightening unknown virus" does not equate to "I think I'll make bizarre shit up."

Let's start with something I've now seen four times on social media, although I couldn't find a good link to the origin of the claim.  This particular flavor of nonsense is that the coronavirus outbreak is particularly dangerous to a specific subset of humanity...

... people who have been vaccinated for other diseases.

It will come as no surprise that the people who are spreading this foolishness are the anti-vaxxers.  How exactly a vaccine for (say) mumps would make you more likely to contract coronavirus they never explain.  The reason for that, of course, is that there is no explanation, because the claim itself is idiotic.  The anti-vaxxers are simply looking for another horrible thing to blame on vaccines, and the Big Bad Guys pushing vaccination -- doctors and "Big Pharma."  And since there is no actual evidence vaccines are dangerous, and ample evidence they reduce your risk of a number of deadly diseases to near zero, if you're going to claim otherwise you pretty much have to spin your argument from whole cloth.

That feeling when you're so ignorant about vaccines you end up reinventing them by mistake.  [Screencap from Twitter]

Then, there's the even more insidious approach of the insane conspiracy theory group QAnon, who have a two-part claim: (1) that Bill Gates patented the Wuhan coronavirus in 2015 and is using it to kill off the weak in some sort of bizarre eugenics experiment; and (2) that all you have to do to cure a coronavirus infection is to drink bleach.

As far as the first part, I don't know what to say except "are you fucking kidding me right now?"  The second part, though, has been around for a while -- the bleach solution ("Miracle Mineral Solution," which contains chlorine dioxide, a highly toxic compound) has been touted as a cure-all for all sorts of viral and bacterial infections.  And the claim is correct in a sense; if you have a coronavirus infection and you drink Miracle Mineral Solution, you won't be sick any more.

You'll be dead.

Lastly, from the "How Do People This Stupid Exist?" department, we have the folks who apparently think that coronavirus has something to do with Corona beer, other than the fact that "corona" appears in both names.

Corona, I hasten to point out (probably unnecessarily), is the Latin word for "crown."  The virus got that name because it's covered with spiky projections that look a little bit crown-like; the beer was given that name because its manufacturers wanted people to think it was the King of Beers (another incorrect claim, as the King of Beers is clearly Guinness).  But the similarity between the names has evidently led some people to think that there is more to it than that, and Google searches for "beer virus" have gone through the roof.

What exactly people think the connection is, I have no idea.  My hopeful side tells me that maybe people are just wanting to find out if anyone really is silly enough to think that the beer contains the virus.  But my gut tells me that it's more likely there really are people who believe the beer is transmitting the virus, or the beer cures the virus, or possibly both at the same time.

Who the hell knows?

Anyhow -- until such time as a coronavirus vaccine is developed, the best way to avoid catching or passing on infection is to do what you (hopefully) are doing already during flu season -- wash your hands frequently, cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze, and if you're sick yourself, stay home.  Other than that, try to resist the temptation to let your emotions carry you away.  Epidemics are bad enough without loopy speculation getting in the way.

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The brilliant, iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman was a larger-than-life character -- an intuitive and deep-thinking scientist, a prankster with an adolescent sense of humor, a world traveler, a wild-child with a reputation for womanizing.  His contributions to physics are too many to list, and he also made a name for himself as a suspect in the 1950s "Red Scare" despite his work the previous decade on the Manhattan Project.  In 1986 -- two years before his death at the age of 69 -- he was still shaking the world, demonstrating to the inquiry into the Challenger disaster that the whole thing could have happened because of an o-ring that shattered from cold winter temperatures.

James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman gives a deep look at the man and the scientist, neither glossing over his faults nor denying his brilliance.  It's an excellent companion to Feynman's own autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?  It's a wonderful retrospective of a fascinating person -- someone who truly lived his own words, "Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter.  Explore the world.  Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough."

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Viral assassins

In yesterday's post, we looked at viral remnants in our own DNA and their possible role in long-term memory formation.  Today, we'll consider the possibility of using viruses in a different way -- to fight bacterial infections.

As I mentioned yesterday, labeling a virus as "alive" is highly debatable.  They certainly don't seem to respond, at least not in the way a living thing ordinarily does -- moving toward or away from a stimulus.  They're so un-life-like that they can actually be crystallized in a test tube, which makes them more like strange, self-replicating chemicals than they are like organisms.

Which is what makes the research that was published in Cell this week even more astonishing.  In "A Host-Produced Quorum-Sensing Autoinducer Controls a Phage Lysis-Lysogeny Decision," by Justin E. Silpe and Bonnie L. Bassler, we learn about a type of bacteriophage (bacteria-killing virus) that seems to be able to sense its prey, and launch an attack when the colony is at its most vulnerable.

Model of a typical bacteriophage [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Adenosine, PhageExterior, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The prey bacteria is Vibrio cholerae, and it's certainly a deserving target.  It causes cholera, which makes water reabsorption in the intestine run backwards -- the host begins to dump water and blood solutes into the intestine, resulting in diarrhea so severe that an adult can dehydrate and die within twelve hours.  With quick treatment, the survival rate is quite good; without it, over half of infected people die, usually within two days of the onset of symptoms.

The virus that Silpe and Bassler were studying, VP882, can wipe out entire colonies of Vibrio cholerae by detecting a set of molecules responsible for quorum sensing, which is how colonial bacteria are able to respond to their environment differently depending of how many are nearby.  When the number of quorum-sensing molecules is low, the virus and the bacteria coexist peacefully.  When it reaches a certain threshold -- meaning there are lots of bacteria there -- the virus suddenly becomes virulent, attacks the bacteria, and wipes out the entire colony.

Other microbiologists have been quick to see the implications.  If VP882 is capable of killing a colony of cholera bacteria swiftly and efficiently, it could potentially be useful as a therapy.  And if it works for killing Vibrio cholerae, why couldn't it work for attacking other kinds of bacteria?  "If you have a lung infection, you might not be able to diagnose what bacteria [are] responsible in time and choose the right phage," said Mark Mimee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  "To get around that, people use cocktails of different phages.  But manufacturing cocktails and adhering to drug regulations is too expensive...  [But] a single recombinant phage—yeah, that would be really interesting."

In other words, create a single viral assassin that could take out any sort of bacteria you wanted.  Silpe and Bassler were able to get VP882 to respond to signals from other bacterial species, including E. coli and Salmonella, but it remains to be seen if you could engineer one kind of phage that could take on any species of bacteria.

It remains to be seen if this would be a good idea.  In a normal, healthy human body, there are right around the same number of human cells and bacterial cells -- on the order of thirty trillion.  Having a normal intestinal and skin "flora" is critical for good health.  It's been shown that in order to treat intractable cases of ulcerative colitis and infection with Clostridium difficile (another bad guy of the bacterial world), there is a good chance that a fecal transplant will help.

Yes, that's exactly what it sounds like.  I'll leave the details of the procedure to your imagination out of respect for my more delicate readers, but suffice it to say that it results in replacing the sick person's intestinal flora with that of a healthy person -- and has a remarkably high cure rate.

So my question is -- apropos of the viral research by Silpe and Bassler -- if you are given a dose of phage intended to treat (for example) strep throat, what's to stop the phage from wiping out all the other bacteria they come into contact with?  I know the chemical signals differ -- that's how they modulated the kill switch for the virus with the three species of bacteria they worked with -- but it seems like there's a huge possibility for this to go very, very badly.  Yes, the therapy would have to be tested exhaustively and approved by the FDA, but the whole thing is a little worrisome, whatever its promise.

In any case, this highlights how little we understand the unseen microscopic world we're immersed in.  Viruses may not be the unresponsive little blobs we thought they were.  And as for VP882 -- it will be fascinating to see where this goes, and if we might have another weapon in our medical arsenal -- a virus that attacks bacteria.

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One of the best books I've read recently is Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.  I wouldn't say it's cheerful, however.  But what Weisman does is to look at what would happen if the human race was to disappear -- how long it would take for our creations to break down, for nature to reassert itself, for the damage we've done to be healed.

The book is full of eye-openers.  First, his prediction is that within 24 hours of the power going out, the New York Subways would fill with water -- once the pumps go out, they'd become underwater caves.  Not long thereafter, the water would eat away at the underpinnings of the roads, and roads would start caving in, before long returning Manhattan to what it was before the Europeans arrived, a swampy island crisscrossed by rivers.  Farms, including the huge industrial farms of the Midwest, would be equally quick; cultivated varieties of wheat and corn would, Weisman says, last only three or four years before being replaced by hardier species, and the land would gradually return to nature (albeit changed by the introduction of highly competitive exotic species that were introduced by us, accidentally or deliberately).

Other places, however, would not rebound quickly.  Or ever.  Nuclear reactor sites would become uninhabitable for enough time that they might as well be considered a permanent loss.  Sites contaminated by heavy metals and non-biodegradable poisons (like dioxins) also would be, although with these there's the possibility of organisms evolving to tolerate, or even break down, the toxins.  (No such hope with radioactivity, unfortunately.)

But despite the dark parts it's a good read, and puts into perspective the effect we've had on the Earth -- and makes even more urgent the case that we need to put the brakes on environmental damage before something really does take our species out for good.